Sally Jane Norman

Currency - something which is current - applies to the wealth of vocabularies, terminologies and syntactical tendencies that are the stuff of our verbal transactions, as much as to the monetary systems subtending commercial intercourse. Changes in currency designate cultural changes, producing the unevenness and instability that arise, for better and for worse, when unlike things are grouped, compared and traded. Specialisation in a given knowledge field may inflate value of the corresponding epistemological currency if rarity limits its use to a select group of initiates, yet this same rarity leads to devaluation if the initiates lose meaningful connections with the community at large. Conversely, massively exchangeable and shareable forms of knowledge tend to be blunted and worn thin in the course of their traffic, before finally boiling down to common sense.

In higher education and research institutions, where knowledge seeking activities are formally shaped and organised, specialist domains are usually defined as disciplines. Efforts to mitigate what may be construed as repressive connotations of this term – discipline having to do with establishing authority – have spawned much productive inter-, pluri-/ multi-, and trans-disciplinary discourse and/or practice. In creative arts institutions in particular, where challenging disciplinary confines is an essential part of learning processes, terms like “nomadology” may be favoured for their resonance with contemporary cultural theory and attitudes. Similarly, the concept of “transvergence” arises from emphasis on transversal movement, as opposed to constituted disciplines. The experiment in building a new university lab described here is anchored in and vindicates specialist knowledge, i.e. disciplines, while seeking to privilege mobility and mutual enrichment of disparate mindsets.

SOCIALLY AND PHYSICALLY GROUNDED BLUE SKY RESEARCH

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne recently undertook major restructuring, involving the creation of interdisciplinary institutes susceptible to foster original research orientations. A weighty organisation like a university prompts queries as to how vigorously it can effectively redefine epistemological boundaries, and how far this activity can be aligned with its imperatives to affirm an institutional identity. Notwithstanding such questions, Culture Lab’s set-up is part of Newcastle’s wilful dislocation/ relocation of the boundaries that tend to legitimate and strengthen specialist knowledge, and sometimes to entrain its atrophy.

The Lab is being housed in historically loaded premises which represent a potent mix of social and physical culture: the 1889 “Assembly Rooms” built as a communal space for professional organisations, have served in recent decades as the university sports centre and are being refurbished for their spring 2006 opening as Culture Lab, a site for theoretical debate and the sweat of creative practice. Large rooms will be used as open plan research, seminar and exhibition/ performance spaces, and small rooms as media labs and workshops. Generic technical infrastructure is being installed, though the Lab’s status as a transient platform for constantly evolving projects precludes purchasing highly specific kit. Permanent staffing will be light for similar reasons: specific competencies will be an integral part of individual projects created and driven by interdisciplinary teams. Project shapes, sizes and intra muros life-spans are likely to vary considerably, as are the kinds of resources they tap into (human effort and technical means, exchange and funding schemes, etc).

Culture Lab is being established as a physical, intellectual, and fundamentally social, project-driven environment where associations of usually separate disciplines across concrete undertakings can spear-head innovation. Rather than show-casing best practice by contracting opportune marriages of well-rated disciplines, the Lab favours the emergence of unexpected alliances likely to shape future research. Tightly predefined lines of exploration tend to produce applied research facilities which are apt to spin out prototypes in answer to short-term demands, but which cannot fire long-term innovation. Conversely, lines of exploration left too loose for too long are unlikely to yield socially meaningful and/ or translatable findings. The blue sky needs to be linked to the earth and vice-versa. This linkage will be reinforced by Culture Lab’s collaborative dimension, since the diverse disciplinary groundings of shared research agendas reflect a wide range of relations with the broader community.

Newcastle’s research fields embrace a vast nexus of potential interrelations: input of interface design skills and artistic virtuosity into the creation of “meta-instruments”, use of biometric and choreographic modelling to extrapolate life-style data from anthropological relics, mapping of online community behavioural patterns by biologists and by social and technical network specialists, implication of economists and legal historians in art works fostering new conceptions of identity and authorship, etc. The list could go on forever, but although projects will be crucial test beds for innovative collaborations, their disciplinary hallmarks are ultimately secondary to their aptitude to further intellectual exchange. Because alliances in a conceptually open arena are formidably unforeseeable, Culture Lab’s ethos is conceived first and foremost in generic terms of interactions of discourse, terms, and methodologies, rather than in terms of disciplinary specificities.

PATTERNS OF COLLABORATION AND RESISTANCE

To make an effective contribution to the broader community, Culture Lab’s focus on collaborative processes needs to be formally documented and reviewed, providing a corpus of transmissible, exploitable research findings. This means endowing projects with strongly reflexive dimensions and/ or openness to third party analysis, to ensure that interactions across disciplines are adequately recorded and studied. To implement dialogue between distinct epistemological systems, their respective terms, goals, means, methods, results and conclusions must be collegially defined. Identification of areas of resistance and irreducibility when negotiating definitions is as important as the identification of areas of ready translation and transposition, these differentials being valuable markers of transdisciplinary dynamics.

Culture Lab aims to constitute a body of methodological know-how based on its experience hosting innovative transdisciplinary research. Parallel to traditional records pertaining to the content of individual projects, new kinds of documentation will be invented to monitor their collaborative profiles. To this end, conventional textual materials will be complemented by audiovisual resources and, in particular, networked media apt to provide insights into social aspects of collective work (elements derived from online fora, blogs, wikis, etc.). While the resultant histories will be as idiosyncratic as the project teams and themes they recount, this information will form a unique base for comparing behavioural and conceptual patterns encountered in transdisciplinary collaborations. The cohabitation of diverse groups under the same roof, and the organisation of documented sessions to share their respective work processes and discuss them with a wider public, will enhance Culture Lab’s ability to engender novel research methodologies.

CULTURE LAB AS A THEATRE OF LIVING INTERACTION

The creative dynamics of transvergence (definable as a turning across and beyond) depends on upholding a balance between inwardly-directed specialisation, and outward movement amongst diverse epistemological systems. Movement is aimless without the discrete resources constituted by specialist knowledge, but it is equally aimless if specialist knowledge is limited to inaccessible enclaves. A capacity to listen, a need to roam unfamiliar domains to acquire fresh insights into a given field of investigation, and willingness to adapt specialist discourse for non-specialist understanding, are essential drivers of transdisciplinary activity, which may inspire researchers of all provenances (the notion of transdisciplinary expertise being something of a contradiction in terms). Culture Lab projects will be instantiated with a view to highlighting the human interactions that underpin innovative research, thus elucidating new potential avenues for collaborative work.

Just as ICT developments testify to growing interest in the systemics of interactive networks, rather than in their discrete components, so the potential of a transdisciplinary research environment depends on quality of the collaborations it affords, rather than on the discrete – however desirable – advances of individually participating disciplines. By forging strange alliances in a hands-on, brains-on environment, and by staging the resultant theoretical models and physical artefacts as mnemonic triggers to new collaborative processes, Culture Lab will be a theatre of eminently living interaction and human-centred research.

April 30th 2005

Sally Jane Norman
Director
Culture Lab Newcastle
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom